THE big news in the past week is the enshrinement of Mo Yan as the Nobel Laureate for literature. As a consequence, printing presses across the country are rumbling to reproduce Mo's works.

Thanks to his coronation, would be art aficionados are queuing up to buy his "Fengru Feitun" (2004) (Big Breasts, Wide Hips).

"Are you happy?" asked a CCTV hostess, in all her naivete. "I do not know. How can I, given all the pressures and anxiety?" Mo retorted.

Educators are talking of including Mo's works into textbooks, the local government is considering converting Mo's native home in Shandong Province into a monument, and a charity star is offering Mo one of his two villas in central Beijing. All this sound and fury is occurring in a country whose people are famous for their lack of interest in worthwhile reading.

The country's few bricks-and-mortar bookstores are disappearing.

To mark Children's Day on June 1, I was given a book card as a gift for my nine-year-old son, which entitled us to buy a certain number of books at designated chain stores. As the store near our office had been closed long ago, I recently took my son to one in a shopping complex in Lujiazui, and found shelf after shelf of books on beautification, health, business and success.

When a shop assistant learned of my intentions, she kept advising me to buy a de lux edition of the four Chinese classical novels, priced at more than 1,000 yuan (US$160), but I thought them better as ornaments in the homes of the nouveaux riches.

Most of the people I know have never felt the need of having books even as ornaments.

In recent years I have been to quite a few homes in suburban Shanghai, where wealth (earned through land expropriation) has enabled most owners to decorate their residences in the height of fashion, often at the cost of tens of thousands of yuan.

But in general, the only reading materials that can be found in these homes were free newsletters from a private hospital known for its panacea in obstetrics, gynecology, and sex-related ailments.

In one of the big residential communities I am familiar with, there are at last 30 restaurants, 10 real estate brokerages, a five-star public toilet worth one million yuan, and an enormous TV panel in public square, but not a single bookstore or library.

The local government did set up a place where the elderly can play mahjong and every day a long line forms in front of the gate well before opening time. In the neighborhood where I live, there are three bookstores, but they are all devoted to reading for primary and middle school students aspiring to higher exam scores.

Since literacy is no longer a problem in China today, this book-barren landscape suggests one important failure of our education system. It suggests that those who are supposed to have benefited from education never feel any urge to read once they are freed from the shackles of learning.

Also, people no longer feel the need to read real books because in this society it's counterproductive to be inspired, to think critically and to benefit from the the sweetness and light that is supposed to be the aim and justification of literature.

Stanley Fish, a legal scholar and literary critic from the US, while discussing the purpose of the humanities, concluded a few years ago, "It is not the business of the humanities to save us, no more than it is their business to bring revenue to a state or a university. What then can they do? They don't do anything, if by 'do' is meant bring about effects in the world."

The pragmatic forces that have come to take control of our country and our people have become deeply suspicious and scornful about this lack of practicality in traditional education.

I am lucky to have witnessed the golden period in the 1980s when serious reading became a national pastime, with books on aesthetics, literature and Western philosophies particularly sought after.

It was not uncommon to see a young woman in Beijing cycling home with some tomatoes and a copy of Li Zehou's "The Journey of Beauty" in the basket.

A middle school student might be going to school armed with a copy of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's "Being and Time" in his school bag.

I saw an old photograph showing a dozen of youths standing or sitting before Shanghai Library, engrossed in the books in their hands, obviously waiting for the library to open.

China's own literary output and quality has not been surpassed since. I could still remember how I treasured any casually obtained literary journal that would keep me in a dreamlike state for several days. Books are being printed to the tune of hundreds of thousands at one impression. I picked up randomly "A Dictionary of Loan Words and Hybrid Words" (1984) from my shelf, and found that its first edition in 1984 had a press run of 260,000 copies. Today only Mo Yan's "Big Breasts, Wide Hips" can hope for that glory.

The decade-long reading fever shaped the national psyche. According to those who know, the topics favored by young people dating at that time were not real estate and money as they are today, but literary genres, ideas, and ideals.

In the standard narrative today, that was a time of material privation and ideological orthodoxy, when most people were dressed alike in drab Mao suits.

But that was a golden time for those who craved to understand and interpret, to judge and appreciate, to argue and agree, and to write well.

This intellectual and artistic equipment enabled people to understand everyday life from another perspective. LV bags and iPads would clearly have had no chance at that time.

As books are sources of ideas, government administration had traditionally been entrusted to good scholars.

Mao Zedong had read "Zizhi Tongjian" (Comprehensive Mirror for Aids in Government"), a 3-million-character historical annals, 17 times, and the book Chiang Kai-shek read most was "Zhongyong" (The Doctrine of the Mean), among the first of the Confucian canon.

Both had great respect for Zeng Guofan (1811-1872), a great scholar and shrewd military strategist in one, who once said that "failure to read classics for one day makes me feel disgusted with myself."

When a populous nation has lost its faculty for critical thinking, and is bent on material accumulation, it can easily create a lot of noises, whether its people are working, buying, or traveling.

Given our strong tradition, we can still transcend the "pleasure" and "usefulness" paradigm by keeping in constant view the "meaning" question.

Only then can we know how to reassert our role in the public sphere and win true respect from our neighbors. That would start with reading "useless" books.